Michael Thorpe told a friend that he shot Jennifer Ross early on Dec. 24 because she wouldn’t turn loose her pocketbook.

“The b---- bucked,” Rashawn Seabrook told a jury of five men and seven women Monday morning in Chatham County Superior Court. “She shouldn’t have bucked.”

Did he say he shot her, prosecutor Ronald Adams asked the witness.

“Yeah,” Seabrook said.

“Did he mean to shoot her?”

Seabrook, a Chatham County jail inmate testifying for the state, initially disowned his entire statement to police saying it was a lie.

In response, Adams played a taped interview with police from Jan. 17.

In the tape, the defendants said they chose the victims because “they were the only people walking through that time of night,” Seabrook said.

The defendants were confident the victims couldn’t identify them because “they (victims) was too drunk,” Seabrook said in his statement to police.

Jennifer Ross, 19, was shot early on Dec. 24, 2005 as she left Orleans Square, walking with three companions. She died New Year’s Day at Memorial Health University Medical Center.

Evidence has shown the slaying occurred during a botched armed robbery and that assailants fled in a gray Ford Taurus.

Seabrook’s nephew, Ernest Seabrook, testified this morning that defendant Kevin Huckabee, who he referred to as “Huck,” gave him the Taurus around Christmas. According to Ernest Seabrook, he was to pay Huckabee $100 for the car.

“I ain’t have it,” Ernest Seabrook testified. “I just told him I’d give it to him when I got it . He didn’t say nothing.”

The witness testified he knew the car was stolen. The police recovered the vehicle Jan. 6 from a car wash at Wheaton Street and Bee Road where Ernest Seabrook worked.